I have been learning all I can about PC's this week and must have done 30+ hours researching and I am at my wits end lol.. I've learnt that all the above components are more or less the best for what I want it to do; University studies, Movies and mostly gaming.

I am chose the 1.5GB version of the GTX 580 as I will be only using one 24" monitor at 1920 x 1200. I heard the 3GB is only useful for higher resolutions which my monitor won't natively support and for multiple monitor which I don't like anyway.

I may attempt to try to overclock in say a year or two when the PC shows it's age but not currently as I don't want to chance damaging anything or voiding warranties.

I am aware that a new Asrock board is out that has PCI-E 3.0 which is needed for the next generation of video cards but I don't need this as I have a GTX 580 which is PCI-E 2.0 and apparently this graphics cards is more than enough to play games on max setting for the next 2 years at least. If I need more power then rather than buying a new PCI-E 3.0 card I would prefer to go the SLI route and get another 580 which by that time will be a lot cheaper.

Here are my questions please;

1) Can someone recommend to me the cheapest and best motherboard for my needs? I heard that Z68 is one of the best but I am completely new to this so I am all ears.

2) Is 650w enough for my current build and if I go SLI then how much power will I need? I might get a higher PSU in preparation of future SLI.

3) Is the case I've chosen any good for cooling and ventilation or do you have alternatives?

4) Do I need to buy an extra cables or anything else for this build? My mother's friend builds pc's for a living and is going to put this all together but I will look stupid when he comes round and there are no cables or anything to put it together lol.

I'm sorry that I am probably asking a question that has been asked 100 times before but I have been researching a lot for all these components again and don't want to do another 10 hours research for something that you guys could answer in a couple of mins. I just want to buy the parts now lol

That case has excellent ventilation, however I have added 4x 120mm Yate loon high speeds to mine and moved the large 230mm fan on top to the side of the case (blowing on the graphics cards). I get extremely low card temps on my SLI 460 setup.

You should have all of the cables you need within the motherboard box or the power supply box.

That case has excellent ventilation, however I have added 4x 120mm Yate loon high speeds to mine and moved the large 230mm fan on top to the side of the case (blowing on the graphics cards). I get extremely low card temps on my SLI 460 setup.

You should have all of the cables you need within the motherboard box or the power supply box.

I can get the Asrock z68 Extreme4 Gen3 for the same price as the GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD3P, which one would you say is better?

Do you think that I would be better off saving money not upgrading my PSU to 850w-1000w and just waiting 2 years to buy a better single GPU? I kind of think it's a waste of money just throwing away a GTX 580 down the line and it would be better going SLI? If the latter it looks like I will get the better PSU now.

Thanks for letting me know about the case, put my mind at ease.

Which heatsink would you personally recommend? And do you think that it is worth me overclocking my CPU and why?

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I'll second the hyper 212+ if you want decent cooling on a budget. The 650w is enough to power a single gtx 580 in that build, but it IS NOT enough if you want to SLI 580. For the motherboard I would say go for a Z68 based board with the features you want on it. For a MOB I usually go for ASUS/Gigabyte first and then MSI if those fall through or are too expensive.

Glad to see you're not getting sucked into pci-e 3.0, we can't even saturated pci-e 2.0 by a single card. The only thing 3.0 will be for boards whom can't run x16 x16 x16 in tri card modes for 1155 platforms.

Well, I had an Asrock board fail horribly once before and never any problems with Gigabyte boards except for one failed ethernet port, so I lean towards Gigabyte. Maybe their build quality has improved over the past couple years, though. I had a socket 478 motherboard from back in the day last me three and a half years... but their AMD 7xx series boards were not quite up to par.

As far as thermal pastes, if you want a good one that is non-conductive I would go with OCZ Freeze or AC MX3.

For wifi gaming I always get PCI or PCIe 1x cards, the brands I trust most are Linksys, Asus and Netgear.

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Do you think that I would be better off saving money not upgrading my PSU to 850w-1000w and just waiting 2 years to buy a better single GPU? I kind of think it's a waste of money just throwing away a GTX 580 down the line and it would be better going SLI? If the latter it looks like I will get the better PSU now.

No, well, the most stable things in terms of PC pricing tend to be power supplies. A good 1000w PSU bought now will probably still be worth a lot in two or three years time. Power supplies also only max out at around 1200-1400w because beyond that you're going beyond the capacity of what most breakers are able to deliver (which is 1500w AC current), so if you get a 1000w or a 1250w you're pretty much future proof. As components move to smaller process like 28nM too, the amount of electricity they use also decreases per transistor count, so...

As far as the heatsinks I like, I mean, it depends on what is on sale at NCIX and where it rests on that list, haha... I have owned 3 Hyper 212+'s and two of them worked great, the third one had minor machining issues on the contacts on the bottom. They are pretty good and are good performance per dollar.

Overclocking to me is pretty worth it because you can gain a good 25%+ performance in many applications for nothing more than the cost of the heatsink. You do need to stability test, but that's not terribly hard (run LinX continually for 48 hours with most of the RAM after you set your overclock in the BIOS; if it goes without error, you're good to go!)